Cue, then, the early morning call (they always looks surprised to get this?), and it was off to the Science Museum in London. A tenuous link to the task, perhaps? The battle for the project management role this time came down to Jamie and a keen-to-try-again Melissa. Given how rubbish Melissa had been last week, oddly she lost the vote unanimously. The other side? Chris, someone who I hadn’t even noticed was a contestant until now, stepped forward. So what crap were they offered? Well, there was a facelift helmet that made you look like a character from Halo. A beeper that went off whenever you slouched (it’d run out of batteries in no time here). Some odd machine that made a man flail his legs in the air. A £50 T-shirt for blokes to sculpt their body. Gardening tools to stop you hurting your back. A water-saving shower head. And a baby grow for ill babies, that involved blasting the little infant with a hairdryer, for what I could see. Melissa, in fact, kept ignoring this, and kept trying to talk at every opportunity. Karren was not impressed. On then to Jamie’s teams other product, the gardening tool, which she was trying to flog to Debenhams. By reading notes off a piece of paper. It did not go well. Melissa’s pitching was getting worse, and she was listening less. This was surely going to be her week. Over to the other team, where Chris and his team started flogging the sculpting T-shirt. He also had the glowing baby grow, which Liz was pitching. Debenhams (sorry, ‘leading department store’) seemed much happier. But she seemd to get a reprieve when an appointment was secured with another chain, that she was set to lead the pitch on. Blimey. Jamie, meanwhile, booked in a £10,000 order, which should keep him safe from the sack for a week or two. And then pissed Melissa off by telling her she wouldn’t get the full order benefit should she flog the product. It all become moot when the demo unit went tits up, and then when the retailer wanted the product for a lot less than they could sell it for. Thus, Melissa was pissed off, and her order book was still empty. Chris’ team went sales hunting too, knowing that each team member had an order book. And Laura got pissy when she thought somebody had nicked her orders. Primarily because they had. But the glowing baby grow still seemed to be going quite well, even if nobody liked the packaging much. The other part of the team went off to try and flog the sculpting T-shirts to, er, ‘adult’ shops in London, and faced The Apprentice conundrum of the exclusivity deal. Which never goes well. This time, it was laced with a massive argument about who took what slice of the deal, while Nick pulled his unimpressed face in the background. Then Chris pointed out that they might not be able to offer it exclusively anyway. Once again, it was all moot. Back to the other team, and the shower head seemed to be going quite well, but – as voiceover man kept telling us – we wouldn’t find out for sure until everyone met again in the boardroom. But it did, and already, the knives were being sharpened for those with relatively empty order books. Baron von Sugar was soon down to the business of tearing new arseoles, with one lot of sales disallowed due to selling below the agreed price. And then the exclusivity issue came up, with The Baron not counting that order either. The big fight was for nothing. A quick, unnecessary look at the winners at a spa followed, and was as dull as it sounded. Please, please, please, can this nonsense be dropped? The argument in the café was more interesting, as Jamie and Melissa went head to head (“there was no room for manouevrement”), but given that the team did get a lot of orders, it was the ‘sub-team’ that was in trouble. It turned out that Melissa, Stuart and Stella didn’t even bring in £1000 between them. Oh dear. Instead, The Baron actually did the logical thing and fired Melissa. She called Stuart and Jamie “horrible people” on the way out, seemingly oblivious to how she has been coming across for weeks. A terrible loser? Granted. And it’s been clear for two weeks now that she was never going to win, too. It was hard, for a change, to argue with the end decision. Even if The Universe will get its revenge, apparently. Two thirds of a cracking episode in all, then, save for the drawing out of the firing. I could have lived without that, and the spa treat, but I’ll be happy to see the task return this time next year. For now, we’ve got fashion to look forward to in a week’s time. And Melissa won’t be there, either…
